They Raided the Joint

<body bgcolor=#ffffff> <center> <table cellpadding=7 width=480> <tr> <td valign=top width=80 rowspan=2> <pre> </pre> <br> <br> © Copyright 2001-2 <br>by <A HREF="mailto:brianalpert@email.com">Brian Alpert;</A><br> All rights reserved. <pre></pre> <a href="../index.html"><img border=0 width=40 height=40 src="../graphics/watstru.gif" alt="[home]"></a> <p> <p> <a href="../docs/places.html"><img border=0 width=40 height=40 src="../graphics/uva.gif" alt="[places]"></a> <p> <p> <a href="../docs/vortex.html"><img border=0 width=40 height=40 src="../graphics/vortex3.gif" alt="[vortex]"></a> <p> <p> <a href="../docs/writing.html"><img border=0 width=40 height=40 src="../graphics/twain.gif" alt="[writing]"></a> <p> <p> <a href="../docs/sounds.html"><img border=0 width=37 height=40 src="../graphics/welk.gif" alt="[sounds]"></a> <p> <p> <p> </td> <td width=310 valign=top> <p align="left"><font size="3">the way out... the road back</font></p> <p><pre> They Raided the Joint ========================== Copyright 2001-2 by Brian S. Alpert. All Rights Reserved. They raided the joint—took everybody down but me... —Dan Burley It's all about timing. In the wake of the curious, yet gratifying Swing music revival of the late 1990's, I joked about my first band's well-intentioned, but ill-timed foray into presenting that very music to unsuspecting 1980 audiences: We—Sitting Ducks—were selling Swing to the masses simultaneously 20 years too early and 40 years too late. We weren't completely alone, of course. The nation was dotted with bands playing Swing or 1940's Rhythm and Blues. Some, like Austin, Texas -based Asleep at the Wheel and Providence, Rhode Island's Roomful of Blues still survive. But back then, we were mavericks fighting the good fight without the benefits of GAP commercials and corporate-driven radio airplay, and as the name Sitting Ducks suggests, we were fighting an uphill battle. Breaking into venues outside our more than averagely sophisticated hometown of Charlottesville Virginia was, well, a slow process. The Big Kahuna of course was the D.C. market, home to a thousand clubs (some of which, like Jack Boyle's Cellar Door or Gary Oelze's Birchmere had become famous), a million bands, and located a mere two hours north. But even in boom times such as they were—the early 1970's to mid 1980's were a veritable golden age for live nightclub music in the northeastern U.S.—it's damned difficult for a new band to break into a competitive urban market. Every club's calendar is full of known quantities, that is, bands known to bring in guaranteed quantities of dollars. But we had been together about a year, were working regularly, and felt we were ready to try. Next: It made sense to talk to some DC-based working musicians.... ============================ Before sending umpteen unopened promo packages to be followed with umpteen-times-ten futile phone calls, it made sense to talk to some DC-based working musicians. I might gain a little insight, or better, a friendly break like an opening gig or last minute replacement call. Most of these bands played Charlottesville so it was easy enough to pester them out of their phone numbers, with which to pester them some more. I plied this strategy to the best of my inchoate abilities and struck pay dirt with the gregarious Bill Holland. A talented musician-writer, Bill was long on experience, his band employing some of DC's best musicians. These included John Jennings, session ace guitarist-producer who would later garner success in the Big Leagues by producing Mary Chapin Carpenter's Grammy-winning records, and bass player Wade Matthews, who would later take me under his wing and become my rhythm section partner and roommate for four years in The Assassins, the best band of which I was ever a full member. Today, Wade shares the stage with veteran guitar hero Nils Lofgren. On the phone, Bill was gracious, explaining in animated detail what club owners would expect from a brand new band and how to leverage that first no-paying off-night gig into a second no-paying off-night gig at a different place: "It's easy—after the first one, you call the second one and tell them you played the first one and it was boffo and you keep bugging them and sooner or later you're in the second one. Just don't expect a lot of money until you can fill the place." I pressed Bill as to what might be a good candidate for "the first one." I could practically hear him thinking: "Let's see, what place is crummy enough to take these guys, not too crummy as to place them in any real peril, and not too important so if they bomb it won't besmirch my good name... Hmm, let's see..." He paused and recommended a club called Mr. Henry's Tenley Circle. Once a DC restaurant institution, Henry's Tenley Circle closed long ago. In 1980 however, it perfectly fit the mold that cast a million others I would eventually work: black walls and ceiling, black and white checkered linoleum floor, tightly-packed tables with red and white plastic checkered tableclothes, tiny, dirty bathrooms, a smoke-filled bar in the next room, and waitresses who wore expressions that indicated they would prefer to be doing just about anything on this earth rather than taking your drink order. Bill's choice was, in a word, perfect. Next: Armed with Bill Holland's good name and secondhand recommendation... =========================== Armed with Bill Holland's good name and secondhand recommendation that I myself would deliver ("Really? I can just tell him you're recommending us?") I made the many requisite phone calls trying to track down Mike, Mr. Henry's manager du jour. For the club owner or manager, booking bands is a basic supply and demand issue: a plethora of bands beating on your door while you're grappling with a plethora of glamorous show business -related duties, such as (take your pick) broken air conditioners/ice machines/refrigerators/steam tables/toilets/taps/soda guns , cranky/quitting/drunk/fighting employees, health inspectors, neighborhood drunks, drunk tourists, underage wannabe drunks... the club owner's problem list goes on and on. As a result, these guys, with their surplus of dependable, regular bands in tow, have no time or incentive to 1) look at promo packages, 2) listen to tapes 3) return phone calls 4) care about rookie bands from Charlottesville. So it's hopeless, right? Of course not. It just means one has to have the persistence of a door-to-door Bible salesman, which is more or less what you are. Get religion and keep pounding. Sooner or later there's a cancellation, or an off night (probably one that's so 'off' he's in no real danger of losing more than he already would have) and the club owner, in a jam, gets religion. And that is what, after calling Mike at Mr. Henry's between noon and seven PM, from March to May, we were finally offered: a Tuesday night. Tuesday June 3rd, 1980, to be precise—right after the local college population had cleared out of town. Guaranteed one of the deadest of all Tuesdays, which is the deadest night of the week under any circumstances. So naturally, I promised to pack the joint. Never mind that we had no fans in Washington, we'd call out the troops, the family, friends, musicians, anyone, everyone. Everyone showed up. The joint was packed. Mom and Dad were there, brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends... Even Melissa, the nutty, beloved woman who cleaned for my Mom. What was expected to be a desolate, lonely Tuesday was a blazing triumph. Happy, relieved, and performing in front of a completely biased crowd, we could do no wrong. At least we thought so, strutting and carrying on both on and off the stage, holding court. Welcome to Washington DC—move over Duke Ellington! Of course, I've since heard those tapes, and in the cold light of a new decade our early attempts at swinging were pretty homely. But if we put on a musical face only a Mother could love, well, Mom was, after all, in the House that night. It was a raucous, chaotic evening. Melissa of all people provided the highlight that would endure for years. Given the rarest of opportunites—drinking on my Dad's tab—she made the most of it, putting on her own show in her loud, over-the-top, loving way. It was a performance my Dad would never let her forget. Next: Four sets later, the crowd gone... I allowed myself an unimaginably naive pretention.... ==================== Four sets later, the crowd gone, the noise and smoke cleared, I basked in the glow of our little milestone and allowed myself an unimaginably naive pretention. I actually hoped that due to the evening's success, the club might pay us more than the agreed-upon $100. The bartender did everything but laugh out loud. As he flipped me the crisp $100 bill, he made the outcome of my sheepishly posed suggestion—it wasn't even a negotiation—clear as a bell: "You had a deal with the boss" he half-smiled, half-sneered. It was a scene befitting a grade B movie—wet-behind-the-ears kid shuffles up to gristle-nosed bartender, and like a latter day Oliver Twist, scrapes for gruel—"Can we have some more, Sir?" Ha! More indeed. Well, no matter, the evening was a success. Buoyed by this, I immediately set about getting a return 'Henry's' gig, and began looking for "the second one"—another club where we could work our newfound magic. I heard through the grapevine that one of Washington's most notorious Hard Rock tourist trap nightclubs—Georgetown's Crazy Horse—had opened up a little club in their downstairs space, and were trying to do Swing, Jazz and Blues. Called Beneath it All (O, how prescient) this was a completely separate venue from the legendary meat market upstairs. To make the point they'd gone to the lengths of paying one of DC's greatest living legend musicians, the great "Redneck Jazz" guitarist Danny Gatton (who I would later meet and tour with) to allow them to use his name, officially promoting it as Danny Gatton's Beneath it All. I asked around and got the name of the fellow (conicidentally, it was also Mike) who was booking the place, and began the inevitable, interminable chore of getting in touch. This Mike had a hipper, more accomodating veneer than the indifferent surliness which characterized the Mr. Henry's version, but it was essentially the same drill: call a million times and wind up with a no-risk Tuesday. Fair enough; first-night success aside, we were still de facto unknowns in DC. I booked the gig, unable to secure even the paltry $100 "guarantee"— we were working squarely for the door, at $2/head. We tried our best to call out the troops, but we had used up all our friends-and-family chits that first night at Mr. Henry's. And though Henry's was a dump, it still had been open for years and had a certain walk-in cachet. Beneath it All however, was unknown and grossly overshadowed by the infamous Top Forty Glam Rock dive upstairs. Nobody was just walking in to that place. We knew we were in trouble. The dank club had no warmth whatsoever; I simply couldn't imagine it full of smiling, drinking, swinging patrons. An appropriately slimy prophesy of the evening, I lost a contact lense down the filthy men's room sink. Lucky for me, intrepid bassist Pete Spaar was nice (and brave) enough to dismantle the drain and retrieve it. I should have treated him to a shot—a tetanus shot that is. We were set up; it was time to start. Unfortunately, we were the only ones there. There was NO ONE in the room save ourselves, the manager and the bartender. In this situation (which sadly, all nightclub musicians experience at one time or another) you can sit around with your thumb up your (Oh, wait—that's another story) or you can play to the bartender and the empty seats, hoping the noise might bring an actual paying customer into the room. So, we sighed and cranked it up. Next: You could hear the thundering roar of the upstairs band at all times... ========================= Now, there's nothing more annoying than trying to play, and realizing the bartender has left the club's prerecorded music playing. This gig did that concept one better—you could hear the thundering roar of the upstairs band at all times, even while we were playing. We were downstairs, no one in the audience, trying desperately to take the 'A' train, while the Crazy Horse brand of Top Forty Hard Rock was thumping and droning in the background. A Swing connoisseur's listening experience it wasn't. This went on for about a half an hour. A few curious people wandered in, maybe three. We were bravely carrying on, knowing we wouldn't even cover the gas money for the trip, when the oddest thing happened. At first, there appeared to be some sort of commotion between the bartender and manager. Then, our tiny audience of three split, in a hurry. That's when we saw the curious faces of two uniformed DC Police officers and one plain clothes officer peering down from atop the back staircase, the one physical connection between the upstairs and downstairs. Their faces wore a look of amused curiousity. It seems that while we were playing our cutsie little swing-thing downstairs, the cops were busting in upstairs, hauling people away, shutting the place down. Spandex-clad rockers scattered like cockroaches while the unlucky few holding drugs and those guilty of being underage were treated to a dose of DC's finest due process. Meanwhile, Beneath it All, with its different name and entrance, and its peculiar band playing nice, harmless music to no one, just didn't fit the mold. We didn't connect with the sin busily being eradicated upstairs. The police looked around, listened for a couple seconds, shrugged their shoulders, and left. We didn't bother to finish the song. We hopped off the 'A' train and commenced the fastest break-down/load-out in history, twenty minutes top to bottom. We were out of there so fast our last notes were still reverberating off the empty club's cinderblock walls as our 1971 GMC Van Dura belched its familiar blue smoke down Route 29 on our way back to Charlottesville. THE END </pre></p> <p><div align="center"> <font size="-1" face="courier"><a href="#top">back to the top</a></font> <br><br><font face="courier"><A HREF="../index.html" target="_top">home</a><br></font></p> <p> </p> <a href="mailto:brianalpert@email.com"><font size="-1" face="courier">© Copyright 1996-2002 by Brian Alpert.<br>All Rights Reserved.</font></a> </div> </td></tr></table> <p> <center><TABLE border="0"> <TR ALIGN=CENTER><TD><a href="../index.html"><img src="../graphics/watstru.GIF" height="40" width="40" border="0" ALT="Home" hspace="5" vspace="5"></a></TD> <TD></TD> <TD><a href="../docs/places.html"><img src="../graphics/UVa.GIF" height="40" width="40" border="0" ALT="A Few Places" hspace="5" vspace="5"></a></TD> <TD></TD> <TD><a href="../docs/vortex.html"><img src="../graphics/vortex3.GIF" height="40" width="40" border="0" ALT="The Vortex" hspace="5" vspace="5"></a></TD> <TD></TD> <TD><a href="../docs/writing.html"><img src="../graphics/van_sm2.gif" height="40" width="50" border="0" ALT="Stories" hspace="5" vspace="5"></a></TD> <TD></TD> <TD><a href="../docs/sounds.html"><img src="../graphics/welk.GIF" height="40" width=33 border="0" ALT="welk" hspace="5" vspace="5"></a></TD> <TD></TD> <TD><a href="../docs/acknowledgements.html"><img src="../graphics/thanks.gif" height="40" width="40" border="0" ALT="thanks" hspace="5" vspace="5"></a></TD> </TR> <TR ALIGN=CENTER> <TD><a href="../index.html"><b>Home</b></a></TD> <TD></TD> <TD><a href="../docs/places.html"><b>Places</b></a></TD> <TD></TD> <TD><a href="../docs/vortex.html"><b>Vortex</b></a></TD> <TD></TD> <TD><a href="../docs/writing.html"><b>Stories</b></a></TD> <TD></TD> <TD><a href="../docs/sounds.html"><b>Sounds</b></a></TD> <TD></TD> <TD><a href="../docs/acknowledgements.html"><b>Thanks</b></a></TD> <TD></TD> </TR> </TABLE> </CENTER>